A new Morning Consult/Politico poll released on Tuesday, a day ahead of the first Democratic presidential primary debates in Miami, reveals that the topics of greatest interest to primary voters are climate change, gun control, and abortion.
Morning Consult reported:
Roughly 3 in 5 Democrats said it was “very important” for the candidates to discuss the three topics, according to the June 21-24 survey, while less than half said the same about the current topics driving the discussion about President Donald Trump’s administration, foreign policy issues regarding Iran and North Korea and trade sanctions on China and Mexico.
A plurality (22%0 of the 707 voters surveyed (with a 4% margin of error) said that health care was the single most important topic, with a majority (54%) also saying that they wanted the candidates to discuss “Medicare for All.”
A majority also wanted to discuss immigration, and half wanted to discuss education policy. The issue of reparations for slavery was the least popular topic among all those presented to Democratic presidential primary voters in the poll.
The debates, hosted by NBC, will be held over two nights, Wednesday and Thursday. Ten candidates will appear onstage on each night, after twenty qualified based on the DNC’s threshold of polling numbers and individual donors. The placement of candidates on the respective nights was supposedly determined, in part, by a random process.
Each debate will run from 9:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. EDT. The rules specify that each candidate will only have 60 seconds to answer a question, and 30 seconds to answer follow-up questions. On average, each candidate should speak for less than 12 minutes. Despite similar rules in some Republican debates in 2015, Donald Trump tended to dominate speaking time.
It is likely the Democratic frontrunners — former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), and Mayor Pete Buttigieg will likely dominate as well.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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